Kamala Harris is a Prince fan, and while you may think you already know a lot about her, her adoration of the Purple One is truly all you need to understand her in the context of 2020’s political craziness. She grew up in a subgeneration of integration babies, sandwiched between Boomers and Gen Xers, post civil rights, witnesses to hip-hop’s earliest days.
Prince, early Prince, was rock and funk, throwing parties for folks of all colors—White/Black, Puerto Rican/Everybody just a-freaking—the patron saint of bougie Black kids who grew up straddling the jagged line between the white world and the Black world. Prince made being Black and sounding white cool, with all the complexities that entailed.
Much has been made of Harris’s more obvious “firsts”—first Black woman on a ticket, first with an Asian background—but she’s also from a very particular moment in American cultural history. At age 55, the child of intellectuals in Northern California, she’s part of a cohort often ignored by demographers, Generation Jones, those of us who came of age during the Reagan years. We missed out on the Black Power Movement, the sexual revolution and women’s lib, Vietnam and Woodstock.
All this shapes Harris the politician, for good and for not-so-good. As a Generation Joneser, she’s the Jan Brady of American politics, the perpetual middle child, wondering why we can’t all get along.
And tonight, on the debate stage, facing off against Vice President Mike Pence, another (older) Joneser, she’ll be trying to thread a needle that’s getting harder to thread every year. She’ll have to toggle between condemning Trumpian policies, charming moderates on the fence—and convincing the younger and the less patient that she’s in step with the times.
But we integration babies are used to dancing to a complicated beat. Our parents had fought a different kind of fight. They were the ones beating on the door until white folks were forced to let them in, bracing themselves against Bull Connor’s fire hoses, letting the world know we shall not be moved.
Or they were immigrants, hailing from the Caribbean or West Africa or South America, banging on that door, pushing past restrictive immigration laws that all too often excluded those of a darker hue.
We were the ones who were already in the door, thanks to their fights. White folks weren’t mysterious beings barricading the door. They were the kids we were sitting next to in algebra class, tumbling next to us in gymnastics, staying up with us until the wee hours at sleepovers. We took showers together, comparing notes on our progress through puberty: Did you get your period yet? White kids weren’t mysterious. How could they be when you already saw them naked? White kids were just part of the crowd.
In our middle-class world, Black was an ever broadening umbrella, both by necessity in this country’s bifurcated color caste system, and by choice, as life changed under the Supreme Court’s 1967 landmark Loving v. Virginia ruling. You could, say, have an Indian mom and a Jamaican dad, and you’d still be Black. You could have a Filipino dad and a Black mom so light-skinned she made you do a double-take, and you’d still be Black. Your mom could be a white lady from the Netherlands and your dad could be a Black man from D.C., and you’d still be Black. You could have two deep dark chocolate parents and sound like a Valley Girl, and of course, you'd still be Black.
Like Harris, I’m a middle-class Generation Joneser, a Black preppie who also swore allegiance to his Purple Majesty. Some of us, like Harris—and like Prince—were bused to all-white schools from majority-Black neighborhoods. Others, like me, grew up in the ’burbs and boroughs next door to white kids, attending prep schools or Catholic academies or the local public schools, part of a hugely optimistic, messy national experiment. (Never mind that folks had been crossing the color line for years, often by force, creating a rainbow of phenotypes among African Americans.)
This didn’t always make for some rosy kumbaya moment. We grew up with the specter of nuclear war hanging over our heads, when it really felt like it could all end with the push of a button, as Prince warned us in 1999. And a lot of times, especially once we got to high school and dating made everything a lot more complicated, we were too Black for the white kids—and way too white for the Black kids.
Code-switching became embedded in our DNA. Barack Obama, another integration baby, was mocked for his fluid code-switching. But for us, that’s not performance. It’s just a survival tool.
That cultural adeptness makes for a canny politician. It’s an adeptness that has held Harris in good stead on the campaign trail, whether she’s jamming to a drumline, making dosas with Mindy Kaling or dragging Joe Biden for his record on school desegregation. And it’s an adeptness that will be on display as she faces off against Mike Pence in the first and only 2020 vice presidential debate.
Compromise and consensus are a key personality trait of Generation Jonesers, particularly among Jonesers of color, said Jonathan Pontell, a social generation expert, who coined the phrase. But that compromising nature, in this era of political extremes, can seem out of step, something for which both Harris and Obama have faced criticism.
“It’s a great skill to have as a politician, to be able to compromise, bring people together,” said Pontell, who’s working on a book about Generation Jones. “But I don’t know how realistic idealism is right now. We as a country are very tribal — and very angry.”
Jonesers, he said, were weaned on idealism as kids in the ’70s, only to be confronted as young adults with the money-hungry cynicism of the ’80s. We were the guinea pigs living through the real changes effected by the turmoil of the ’60s, turmoil we were too young to understand. As integration babies, Black Jonesers were raised with high expectations, expected to excel, to bust ceilings.
But racism is real, and often, when we were accepted into Harvard or Yale or Dartmouth or got that plum job, our peers, the kids we hung out with on the playground, accused us of being unworthy beneficiaries of affirmative action. Racism, we learned, has a particular sting when it’s being wielded by the one you thought was your ride or die. It’s why some of us, like Harris, embraced HBCU life, seeking belonging. Acceptance.
Straddling the racial divide can be a painful and lonely place. A number of my friends, bougie Black kids who grew up with the best, and with expectations to be the best, didn’t make it out of their 30s alive—felled by drugs, or by suicide, or by sheer bad luck.
Prince knew all this, tapping into the angst of a subgeneration. He always looked askance at the poor hand we’d been dealt, but he hid from the world, choosing to shroud himself in mystery.
Toward the end of his life, though, he picked out his ’fro and stepped into the light, becoming increasingly vocal about his politics, speaking out for Black Lives Matter. In the wake of the death of Freddie Grey at the hands of Baltimore police, he held a benefit concert he dubbed, “Rally 4 Peace.”
When he died, my husband and I held a vigil at our house, playing Prince nonstop, wiping away tears. I’ve read that Kamala and her husband did the same.